Cutthroat Dungeon Sprints 6-7

Sprint 6

For the 6th sprint I was tasked with making the level one big dungeon instead of small separate rooms. I also made some small touches to the level so the transition to room to room could feel a lot smoother for the player.

This is the transition for the player to go from the first floor to the second floor. I decided to place them on blocks so the player would have a easier time getting up these stairs

I decided to fill these rooms with rocks to add a bit more cover for the player when they are getting attacked by enemies with ranged attacks.

This was originally planned for the player to be spawned at their house then enter the dungeon. However due to some cuts that were made on the programming side I had to cut the player’s house from the level. 

The final level change that I made was just purely for aesthetics reasons. I wanted to add pillars under the upper floor to serve as support to make more sense in the level. I also made sure to put some kind of border on the openings of my level to indicate that the player could go through there. 

I was also tasked with now polishing up the models in my level and getting them ready for texturing. I first started with the bed and the stairs since I consider them to take the most time when it comes to polishing and UVing. In the end the process went smoothly having no errors with the UV map that I set the bed and stairs in.

The next set of models to polish and UV was simple since the models themselves were simple enough to make. I decided to also polish and UV the pot since I had extra time in the sprint to do so. For the next and final sprint I would have to ID all these models and import them to Substance Painter for texturing.

Sprint 7

For the final sprint I was assigned to make sure that the models were completed, textured, and placed in the level. The level also had to be fully polished and textured. 

I first started to ID my sets so it will make the process of texturing them easier for me when I import them into Substance Painter. Going through this extra step is extremely useful since it lets you texture any specific spot you want on the model. However the downside to doing this process is that sometimes the textures overlap on other textures requiring just a bit of clean up so it does not look too messy. After cleaning it up, adding details to my models became a simple process. 

In the end this turned out to be the final product of my textures. The next task now is to replace the old assets that I had in the level and replaced them with the new ones. The most trouble that I had with the process is replacing the stairs since a special set of colliders was set up for it. 

My final task was texturing the dungeon and making any small changes to it if needed. I have used the textures that was provided by one of my group members named Josh and have set them up on where it seems like a good fit to place them. However during this process I was informed that the coding for the player to see through walls did not work in the end.

In the end I have decided to replace the front walls that the player sees with mini walls and more Gothic fences. Constructing the level this way made it so that the player would be able to see themselves when going through the backside of my level. I was also assisted by a group when it came to setting up the correct lighting for the level and terrain. My teleport script that I made a few scripts ago was utilized where if the player somehow manages to fall under the level they would respawn at the starting position they were originally at. 

With that it concludes the tasks that I was assigned for this sprint which was mostly getting the level polished for the player to explore in the final prototype. 

377 Sprint 4

When it comes to sprint 4 my main priority was to make a fun and interactive menu screen for the player. I decided to start on this approach by first making a neat title for our game. Since our game play involves the player popping as much trash bubbles as they can I have decided to go with more of a bubbly text for our title. Once I had finished creating this cute lettering I then jumped into how to implement this to our main menu.

This is the result that i came up with which the theme is a sunny day at the beach. I wanted the player to be approached with bright colors so they could feel a sense of happiness whenever they open up the game. I added the turtle next to the title as another cute factor and also serve as a preview on what the turtles that they are saving look like. I made the buttons look pop-able to make it fun and interactive as well  I had a bit of a issue figuring out how to utilize the gradients to make my background more beautiful but I was helped by my project lead with a quick tutorial on how to use it. 

After i had finish with the main menu I have decided to start work on our rule sheet. I decided to go with the Segoe Print  font in Photoshop because I loved how bold and smoothness look of it.  The hard part was creating the pointing hand for the  rule sheet to help the player visualize how they are suppose to tap the trash bubbles. I eventually just traced a person's pointing hand on Google and added some details to it in the end. 

I then finished up the rule sheet with a power-ups guide to help the player identify what they do. I also created a arrow to help the player get back to page one of the rule sheet if needed too.

Since I finished my assignments a bit earlier than expected I have worked on the heart power-up which give the player one extra life. I decided to go with a big red heart since most players know that it translates to health and also signifies their love and determination to save the turtles. 

I have had a simple time completing my tasks on time for this sprint and i look forward to the next one where I will continue working on the UI designs for our game. I will also be creating more animals like seagulls to add more life to our game and for our project lead to possibly help animate them. We are heading towards polishing our main game mechanic and moving forward to possibly create another mechanic where you adopt and take care of a turtle. 

470 Sprints 1-3

I became a level designer for a game that my group is making which is Cutthroat Dungeon. The game became a immediate interest for me when I realized that the visual direction of this game is going to be 2-D sprites interacting with a 3-D world environment. The idea of that sounds fun and would make for some interesting level designs that I could make for the game. In total, the amount of tasks that was assigned to me were 12 tasks with one of them still in progress. The task that was assigned was to create a transition for descending levels, but there were still some uncertainties on how we wanted our game to turn out.

(Game: Zombie Estate)

I started to make some simple level designs based off zombie estate with a bit of a mix. In the game zombie estate the player is rushed by waves of zombies that they must survive on. The level was built so the player will have room to dodge zombies and run away from them. There is usually not a ton of obstacles blocking the player's view to their character too. I created my levels similar to that idea but made it a bit more interesting to traverse around.  

Each dungeon represents a different idea for our game. Dungeon one is a mix of an open area and tight spaces the player could walk around in. Dungeon 2 represents just a pure open area that the player could just walk around and not worry about obstacles getting in their way like Zombie Estate. Finally, dungeon 3 involves a bunch of enemies in tight areas where in order to get through the level they must go through the enemies. After the paper prototype the most favorite dungeon seemed to be the first one with dungeon 2 and 3 being tied for second place.

It was then when I decided to implement the paper prototype design into digital form with a few changes. Dungeon 3 and dungeon 1 both had the same similar designs that the players were looking forward to in our game so I decided to set aside the first dungeon for now and create another design that involves players looting for chests. The placement for the kitchen is in the center of the top boxed area where the player could just walk straight in to perform the second biggest mechanic of our game which is cooking. It was decided that it was going to be the player interacting with a object and they would either load into another scene to start cooking or a UI will pop up that the player can interact with.

After our modeler was finished including some basic assets for our game I got to work on implementing this assets for my level. I made sure to make the levels aesthetically pleasing for our play test  where the players won't feel that they are roaming around in some empty, emotionless level. When I showed this to my modeler he said that roaming the levels feels like they are roaming in a zen garden.  We did however had some issues where programming became hard when it comes to player movement so I had to take away the chests the player were suppose to loot from for now. Eventually the play testing for the levels had to be pushed back since we made a ton of changes to our game character setup.

With those changes came the issue of where the player was able to clip through the corner of each wall intersection. Since we were still working out issues with the player movement I decided to help solve this problem by adding another wall to eliminate the sharp corners the player could glitch through. This is a problem that I had on a previous game I worked on and this solution seemed to work out fine for this game as well. 

I have made sure to implement these corner fixes to my level as well on areas that needed them. It seems that placing the rock colliders that were implemented in the game as well as the tress seems to do the trick too. It took quite a bit of time to implement these colliders since the player would sometimes go through them anyways if it was placed incorrectly but it was all worth it since I was seeing the player not being able to glitch out of the level. 

Eventually we made a simple level where the player can roam around and test out the movement controls and fighting mechanics. We made a level where they can chop down trees and find different ways to fight enemies. Even though this was a really simple level to make, this made me realize how I want the players to wander and fight enemies in the level. I decided to do some research on levels of Paper Mario The Thousand Year Old Door and luckily I have found a website that has just what I needed. This website includes all the levels of the game where I am free to no clip through the environment and explore their level designs.

(Palace Gardens)

These two levels is what brought my attention on how they made their designs. For the palace gardens, this level design layout is all centered around the tower in the middle. The camera never shifts to the left,right, or the backside of the tower which leaves only the front view that the player can see. I want to design some of my levels like this where the transition to a dungeon could be a room where the entrance is located in the middle with their introduction to their own theme. For example, before the player enters the dungeon they enter a room where it introduces a preview to the theme of it.  

(Rogueport Main Square)

Rogueport caught my attention of how they got around the issue of what happens if they ran the player to explore what is in the back of the main square. I always had this issue where I wanted the player to be able to explore the back of a wall or building but was unable to think how with the way we built our game for the camera to always lock onto the player. 

Luckily I still had a copy of the game and saw how they were able to get past through this obstacle. It was just a simple trick of making their back walls planes! The camera shifting might be a intimidating task for our programmer, but if we are able to pull it off for our upcoming sprint, then this opens more room for creativity when it comes to level design. 

Sadly for this sprint I was put on hold when it comes to level design because of the character changes that needed to be made and polished but I am looking forward to our upcoming sprint where I plan to make up for the lost time by designing interesting level with this new mindset that I have for our game. It was a bit of a bumpy ride from the start of our sprint 3 to the end of it but everything should be running smooth by the start of our sprint 4. 

I thank you for reading this blog post and in case you were curious about this no clip website I shall provide the link here! Noclip.website

377 Sprints 1-3

I have become a 2D artist for a game my group is making called Save The Turtles. I am in charge so far of creating simple artistic designs for our game such as creating basic UI designs or objects. The amount of tasks that I was assigned so far is 28 tasks with all of them completed expect for my last task this 3rd sprint which is creating a menu screen for our game. For next week we are going to start on Sprint 4 which looks to be just tasks for our refining our game for now. It also seems like I will be creating mostly UI designs for this sprint so I am looking forward to what I create.

Here is the first artistic piece I have created for our game. I started off by making the design of the turtle as well as some bubbles for the player to pop. Since this is the first time becoming a 2D artist making them visually pleasing for the players was tough. However, thanks to the recommendations from my group on how I should improve my turtle, I feel confident to say that I am proud of this design.

This is the trash bubble that I have created for the players to pop. There are many others like this design but I chose this bag bubble because I personally became the most proud of it. The most difficult part was thinking of the way of how to make the bag look loose and after a couple of tries drawing lines at certain spots I became happy with this design.

The pipe was of course simple to make but to make it look dirty was the tricky part. I became stumped because I was just using simple brush tools at the time to create my art pieces. I finally opened myself up to use more brush presets in Photoshop and it ended up working out in the end. I had to modify some of them to get it to look like the dirt spots I wanted and I have become very happy of how my pipe has turned out.

I was tasked to creating ideas for the power up bubbles since I became way ahead of my tasks. This is the first idea that I had which is the bomb power up where if the player pops it the screen clears up of any trash that is there. My group members and myself love the background design which is just a rainbow to attract the player to touching this bubble.

At the end of the sprint I was assigned to create some simple UI designs for the victory and game over screens. I had the most fun creating these because it allowed me to think of various approaches that I could go along with it. For the victory screen I went with the simple idea of the ocean and the beach being clean with the turtles just swimming off into the sunset.

For the game over screen I have decided to go a dark route which makes the player want to play the game again to save the poor turtles. The idea for this design was to place a dead turtle on top of a bunch of trash with the ocean looking polluted. 

I have finished making the concept of how I want the level select screen to look like and in progress for creating the main menu screen. For the level select screen I want each snapshot of the level to be put in the box I have setup in the middle. This is where the player gets to see the preview of the level and their progress for making the ocean cleaner from trash. Since the main menu screen is going to be the first thing the players see I want it to look pretty with a fancy title and a great UI design. 

So far during these sprints I had a smooth time completing and turning in my work on time and I have felt no pressure on what I should be working on next. I love working with this team and I hope to see what our game will look like by the end of this semester!

Blacksmith Micro Scene 4

For this week I have been mostly polishing the UV's that people have said to improve upon when I presented them. The anvil now looks much cleaner than before and I made sure to cut the anvil up into pieces in which metal wear might appear on.

For this model I have just simply made sure that all the parts to this are the same resolution to each other. I also had to reorganize my UV setup since the size of some parts were increased.

I have finally finished the UV process for my structure that I am going to have for my scene. It took quite a while considering that I have to delete a bunch of edges since this model was triangulated. However right after that process the whole UV process has went smoothly.

I am now on the stage of just organizing my model's UVs together. I have decided to put the hammer, barrel, and stool together since I figured I would be using the same wood texture for each one.

Game Scene Week 5

So for this week I have been finishing up the car to be setup for Substance Painter. I have setup the ID and the low poly models but the high poly model still needs some work to be done to it. The following list will be about the UV's that I have done to the car. 

The main hardship was trying to model the UV and the tires since the edges around the bumps has a hard time translating well into Substance Painter at times so I wanted to make sure that I was doing the UV's carefully.

Tire

Base

Windows

Mirror

License Plate

Lights

I do plan on combining all together on one UV map except for the tires which I will plan to put on either a 1k map or a 512 map. I kept all the windows and lights separate from the car because I was not too sure if that was needed for Substance Painter to make these either transparent or glowing.

 

In this video I just did some simple coding for our Unity scene. What I programmed is that when the player collects 3 pickups and touch the even block the surprise block will appear.